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""Kant's Critique of Pure Reason"" remains one of the landmark works of Western philosophy. Most philosophy students encounter it at some point in their studies but at nearly 700 pages of detailed and complex argument it is also a demanding and intimidating read. James O'Shea's short introduction to ""CPR"" aims to make it less so. Aimed at students coming to the book for the first time, it provides step by step analysis in clear, unambiguous prose. The conceptual problems Kant sought to resolve are outlined, and his conclusions concerning the nature of the faculty of human knowledge and possi

AbstractThe idea of 'the given' and its alleged problematic status as most famously articulated by Sellars (1956, 1981) continues to be at the center of heated controversies about foundationalism in epistemology, about 'conceptualism' and nonconceptual content in the philosophy of perception, and about the nature of the experiential given in phenomenology and in the cognitive sciences. I argue that the question of just what the myth of the given is supposed to be in the first place is more complex than has typically been supposed in these debates, and that clarification of this prior question has surprising consequences. Foundationalism was only one of Sellars's targets, and this not only in the familiar sense that the more fundamental issues at stake concern the very 'objective purport' or intentionality of our empirical thinking in general. When pushed further still, Sellars's critique in fact hinged on his diagnoses of implicit framework-relative or 'categorial' metaphysical presuppositions he exposes in givenist views. Furthermore, the key to his critique accordingly turns out to rest on implicit assumptions concerning the in principle revisability or replaceability of any such presuppositions, whether 'innate' or acquired, and including Sellars's own. Another key result is that widespread assumptions that Sellars's famous critique is simply inapplicable or irrelevant to either 'thin' nonconceptualist views of the given (such as C. I. Lewis's), since they are 'non-epistemic'; or alternatively, irrelevant to 'thick' conceptualist and phenomenological analyses (since they, too, reject 'sense-data' or the 'bare given')–both turn out to be mistaken.

This volume explores the thought and intellectual legacy of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. A team of experts critically examines the groundbreaking means by which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality